Racketboy forums’ Summer Games Challenge 2019

[pook99]

@pierot: that was a great rant.

I personally don't know who thought the idea of false floors was a good one, it is an old video game trope that, thankfully, has completely died out. I think we all agree the worst offender is castlevania 2 but there were an annoying amount of games that would have you just randomnly fall through a floor with absolutely no visual difference. That is trial/error and memorization at its worst. Even my beloved Mega Man series had a false floor section in one of its games(I think 3 but they all kind of gel together in my mind)

[pierrot]

I haven’t played a whole lot of Simon’s Quest, but at least there you have a tool to actually find the false floors before falling down them. Mega Man, also, tends to give some hints about the false floors, and some weapons to search them out, as I recall.

[noiseredux]

I haven’t played a whole lot of Simon’s Quest, but at least there you have a tool to actually find the false floors before falling down them.

pfft, a waste of good holy water, though!

[pierrot]

Granted, but I feel like that might have been Dracula’s plan (or whoever the schemer for that game is). Get him to waste all his holy water on floors. Little did he know that Simon had been hoarding it.

[marurun]

Simon's an innately holy dude. He probably just pees in the bottles. But still, carrying around that much delicate glass is clearly a logistical issue. Further, I hope he has great shoes, because he's littering everything with broken glass. He'll cut his feet to shreds!

[pierrot]

Maru, I think what you may have established is that Simon was the true enemy of the people.

[MrPopo]

Even my beloved Mega Man series had a false floor section in one of its games(I think 3 but they all kind of gel together in my mind)

Mega Man 2: Wily 4. The game at least nicely has a harmless false floor before the false floor over instant death spikes, so that you can be informed it is a mechanic, and Lead Bubble lets you detect it.

[Sarge]

I was forced to look up where the last stupid town was, because at no point does it even suggest that the hammer has another function, and why would anyone even think it would? (Key, I just started watching through your recordings, so I'm sure I'll get to it eventually, but how in the world did you figure that out? Is it in the manual? Curse you, manuel!)

Heh. This is where I got stuck when I was a kid, and once I read "Jeff Rovin's How to Win at Nintendo Games, Vol. 4", I knew what I needed to do. A buddy of mine lost my manual, which does have that crucial bit of information, but that town is also the only place in the game where you can't just walk over the correct tile and enter. I think it's the one place where the lack of consistency in the rules hurts the game.

Otherwise? I love Zelda II. No, really, I do. I tend to replay it every few years. It was a love-hate-love relationship, but it's stuck on love now. I replay it more than the original NES game, which is saying something. Whether that is the quality of the game or the person making the statement, I leave to the reader.

[Ack]

1. F.E.A.R. 2
2. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
3. Ultima III: Exodus
4. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
5. Far Cry 2

Yeah, I've wrapped up trapsing around Africa, screwing up an unspecified nation that probably would have been considerably better off had no Europeans ever shown up on its doorstep. End result: I sent a bunch of civilians unharmed into refugee camps and either get the delightful choice of blowing myself up using a car battery and dynamite or putting a gun in my mouth.

If you think that's a brutal ending, I also murdered a troop of my mercenary friends over a briefcase of diamonds. Though to be fair, they drew first, so I didn't have much choice. That's not so true for the variety of faction commanders, officials, DJs, doctors, journalists, and other folks that I humiliated, threatened, or openly assassinated as a hired hand playing both sides against the middle. Yeah...I never really was the good guy type. And now pretty much everyone is dead, the country is an anarchic shithole, and millions are displaced...but still alive. Small victories, folks.

[Ack]

Right, well, seeing as I've hit five, I'm tapping out for the seasons, folks. This doesn't mean I'm going to stop playing games, of course; I never stop playing games. It just means that I'm going to go for other stuff that is far less "classic." Look for me in the RPG subforum now as I finally get off my ass to play Eye of the Beholder III.